Saturday, March 17, 2012

Dice and Decideability,or Just a Minute at the Institute for Advanced Studieswith apologies to Jane Austin

"It is a fact universally computed that a single man in possessionof a small fortune wheel, might not actually be in search of awife".

ALbert looked at Mrs Einstein over the breakfast table in the warmPrince Town sunlight of late august with admiration.

"You're talking about Alan again aren't you my dear?" he asked her.Alan Mathison Turing was the talk of the town, since he arrivedwith his small travelling show in tow. Everyone had become addictedto the game, where you had to discuss one of the 23 famous HilbertChallenges for 1 minute, without any hesitation (the halting problem),repetition (the loop), or dangling pointers (relevance).

The Elephant in the Room was the undeniable fact that Alan hadalready solved one of them, but had not had space on the limitedstone tablet that was all Cambridge University could afford him, towrite down the proof.

Mrs Einstein was pleased that Johnny von Neumann had finallysettled down and was getting on with that huge birdsnest of glowingtubes that looked like it was going to make a great ChristmasLights, or maybe decorate the Founders Hall for the Alumni Ball -what fun that was, with old students and colleagues dressed to thenines (often wearing leopard skin pillbox hats and accompanyingtails in satin). Even Albert usually brushed his hair for theoccasion, although Alan would probably make himself scarce. A fewthousand people was a lot to cater for, when counting AustrainPastries, but was a vanishingly small number when it came tocounting the number of ways that their gene's could combine, orindeed, just the time it would take to fly to the stats in therelativistically challenged Wright Brothers' phantastic newmachine.

What fun. All the fun of the fair. And with Alan's new infinitewheel of fortune (or non-deterministic mill, as he rather strangelycalled it), even if God didn't, Albert would be playing Dice oncemore.

of course, all the best stories end after happily, ever tale recursive